Wiki

Ok, thanks both.
I saw the save but wasn't sure if there was any checking done,
apparently not.

I'll check the format for hyperlinks.
For this, and the small text, I'm taking the html tags out of the
French pages, so these ones look very much like them, hands across
the sea, detente and all of that. I agree about the size. I'll see
if I can find editor tags for code, hmmm, there were some in the
first article I did.

On another point, the French markup has a classname for the span tag
which is quite, but not completely, like the title of the page.
Anyone know what that's about, what it does, or if we ought to have
something similar in the English pages?

Regards
Mark

Hi :slight_smile:
Hmm, not sure what you mean exactly.  Do you mean at the very bottom of the page the

[[Category: FR/FAQ/Base]]

things?  Tbh i just ignore those.  I guess your page would need to change it to

[[Category: Faq/Base]]

But Categories might be set-up on a special page that i have no idea about yet and your new category might need to be added to that before it lets you change that.  I'm not sure but you are free to test to find out.

Note that the "Preview" button is very handy but i almost invariably find some slight error or remember "just one more thing" just after hitting the "Save page" button.  Previewing doesn't seem to save me from that.  Then i just have to decide whether to deal with it straight away or leave to next time (unless someone else fixes it before then).

Remember it is collaborative so people might change things without asking you.  With some pages i tend to do CtrlA CtrlC and then paste all the wiki-code into Gedit (a text editor a bit like Notepad) and save somewhere just in case someone really stuffs up the page irrecoverably.  However it's almost never happened by mistake.  Even fairly serious problems can be undone fairly easily or a missing tag is often quite obvious to people reading the "Recent Changes" page
http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Special:RecentChanges

Looks like you are doing a good thing there :slight_smile:
Many thanks and regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

Thanks again Jean, that certainly pointed me in the right direction,
although I s'pose if I'd been sensible enough to use the editor
controls I might've got a bit further ahead.

I'm cutting the html out of the French pages, translating the text
and leaving the tags there, mostly. Interestingly (?) putting in the
html tag for "bold" is what makes that small bold text, using the
editor controls does it right (doh!). I've now changed those. And I
found the tags for code display (that the French contributors are
using, anyway) and have put those in.

I'll carry on working through a few pages a day. That could go quite
quickly, at least until I get to the "tutorial" :frowning:

Regards
Mark

Hi :slight_smile:
I find that is the best way to learn.  Just by doing and then finding something doesn't quite work and stumbling on the answer later, perhaps by seeing a different page where the thing did work.  Dipping into the wiki help guide helps too but experimentation is the main way.

Sometimes what should work in theory doesn't quite work in practice, as you have already found.  Different wikis sometimes have slightly different systems and then Moin-moin or something crops up occasionally just to confuse things. 
''' = bold
'' = italics

I guess the <tt> tag was meant to be italics?  I avoid italics
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

IIRC the <tt> tag is for monotype (fixed spacing); I think it stands
for "typewriter text" or some such. Also, IIRC it has been deprecated
and something else should be used instead. I'd have to look that up to
be sure -- especially about what has replaced it.

--Jean

IIRC the <tt> tag is for monotype (fixed spacing);

At the very least I'll stop using those. If I make the time I'll go back to
those couple of articles and take them out.

Thanx!
Mark Stanton
One small step for mankind...

Hi Tom,

Hmm, not sure what you mean exactly. Do you mean at the very bottom of the page the

[[Category: FR/FAQ/Base]]

No. I mean at the top of the French pages, in the title the span tag has an id (not a
class, sorry) that is a very long string, almost the same as the title (within the
bounds of tag requirements). You have to look at the page's source code (could easily
be press control-U when looking at the page) to see it.
I don't know what this would be used for.

Things? Tbh i just ignore those. I guess your page would need to change it to

[[Category: Faq/Base]]

I hadn't considered this.
D'you think *really* it ought to change to Faq/En/Base?

And, kinda related, if I'm looking at the English page and want to see the French page
and don't have the link you supplied to hand, shouldn't I be able to click on "Fr" in
the list of languages as the top of the page? Looks like all those links are broken...

With some pages i tend to do CtrlA CtrlC and then paste
all the wiki-code into Gedit (a text editor a bit like Notepad) and
save somewhere just in case someone really stuffs up the page irrecoverably.

Hmmm, no backups?

Looks like you are doing a good thing there :slight_smile:

Thanks :slight_smile:
Mark Stanton
One small step for mankind...

Hi Mark,

With some pages i tend to do CtrlA CtrlC and then paste
all the wiki-code into Gedit (a text editor a bit like Notepad) and
save somewhere just in case someone really stuffs up the page irrecoverably.

Hmmm, no backups?

There is version management built into MediaWiki, allowing easy
restoration of previous versions of pages, file uploads, etc., and TDF
is pretty diligent taking regular in server backups, so not too many
worries there.

Hi :slight_smile:
Yes, it's just that i am totally paranoid and tend to keep excessive back-ups.

On the Joomla wiki one of their admins decided to delete a couple of my pages because they didn't want practical advice with screen-shots of how to use Joomla in real-world cases using 3rd party hosts in case that might be construed as "advertising" or seen as Joomla endorsing those 3rd party hosting services.  Wikipedia and many other encyclopedias have articles about many mutually exclusive beliefs but i
doubt anyone thinks Wikipedia is endorsing or advertising those beliefs.  The Joomla people don't see it that way.

It's only admins that have that sort of power and everywhere else except Joomla they seem to take care to be reasonable or at least to understand the nature of wikis.
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

Hi :slight_smile:
I never use the wysiwyg editor but i'm happy for other people to use it.  If tidying needs to be done afterwards there are plenty of people that are happy to play with the wiki markup/ code.

Mark, it's good to see you are diving straight into the code too :)  I seldom know the proper names of things so there is no need to apologise.  It is possible to give a page a title that is slightly different from it's Url.  The French Faq might be doing that to show proper Title Case rather than CamelCase-mixed_with_numbers-and_strange_inconsistent-charaters.

English 'should' really be Faq/En but that would make it inconsistent with the entire rest of the LO wiki.  If we did that then the French pages would need to be Faq/En/Fr.  Sadly we have to stick with the way things are set-up in the rest of the LO wiki.  They had to choose 1 way when the whole thing was set-up and they opted for "English as the international language" despite most of the people involved back then being non-English themselves.

The languages links at the top don't work because the French team used good common sense when they set-up their pages instead of looking at how the rest of the LO wiki was set-up.  We need to either
1. Rewrite the language selector and re-organise the entire LO wiki for many English pages as well as all pages for all other languages
2.  Convince the French Team to change their main Faq page address to Faq/Fr
3.  Sneakily add a new page called Faq/Fr and copy&paste the contents of the page FR/FAQ to it and just hope their links still work.

I am in favour of option 3 and then use that to ask them if they think it's ok.  It's a bit cheeky but it makes it much easier to explain.

My own backups are fairly unreliable and i rarely trust other people's either.  Even so i tend to lose things occasionally but that is more down to my own filing and reliability than anything.  The official LO wiki back-ups seem fine. 
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

Hi :slight_smile:
Agreed.  It makes sense to get the bulk of the work done as quickly as reasonably possible without getting bogged-down in detail.  "Release early and release often".  If the first pass gets done and people start using that Faq then they might tidy as they go.  It might draw more people in.

Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

Ok, just answered my own question.
Reading the manual would help, and using the editor factilies :frowning:
It's going a bit better now.
At some point I might (aka "should") get round to making new screen
shots so that it's in English, but...

Mark Stanton
One small step for mankind...

Hi :slight_smile:
The Odts have screen-shots but it's probably difficult to access them usefully.  Anyway at least the French screen-shots give a rough idea of how things look.  They could be sorted on a 2nd or 3rd pass otherwise it's going to slow things down.
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

I am in favour of option 3 and then use that to ask them if they think
it's ok. It's a bit cheeky but it makes it much easier to explain.

I think (from a slightly less superficial look at the menu bar in the editor) that a
redirection page with the "right" name could be set up...

Mark Stanton
One small step for mankind...

There is version management built into MediaWiki, allowing easy
restoration of previous versions of pages, file uploads, etc., and TDF
is pretty diligent taking regular in server backups, so not too many
worries there.

Ok, that's good enough for me. I've got all my paranoia quota used up elsewhere.

:slight_smile:
Mark Stanton
One small step for mankind...

Hi :slight_smile:
If you can fix-up a menu that looks about the same but that actually works then that would be fantastic.  The one that is there at the moment is used on a lot of other pages so we would need a 2nd one or a custom made one just for the Faq page(s).

If you are not sure that you can do it but think there is a chance then go for it. 
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

Ok, here's how to do it.

Create a page with the right name/in the right place (I don't know
how that works, should I?), and on that page put

#REDIRECT [[FR/FAQ/Base]]

I suspect it needs to be on the first line.

I *think* you'll then find that Robert *is* your father's brother
:slight_smile:

Is there a FAQ in any other languages? All the entries on the top
menu suggest not...
Perhaps it'll be easier to translate from English than from French?

All the best
Mark Stanton
One small step for mankind...

Err, that really ought to be

#REDIRECT [[FR/FAQ/]]

Of course :frowning:

Mark Stanton
One small step for mankind...

Hi :slight_smile:
Thanks Mark :))

I created the page and copy&pasted your coding into the page and it works.
So i get the smartie points for your work there. Thanks :slight_smile:

For translating i think people are more familiar with the idea of
translating from the English. It's inevitable that other teams are going to
have things completed ahead of the English/American and that it might be
easier to translate directly from the, for example Brazilian to Portuguese
but so far i think work-flow has been established as being from English so
they would probably feel more comfortable doing Brazilian - English -
Portuguese. Ok, that is probably a bad example as those 2 teams probably
are used to working together well, more than most others.

Hopefully tighter integration between a wider variety of different languages
might happen in the future given that uptake of LO is lower in countries
where the dominant language is English. In most of Europe LO&OOo's market
share is allegedly around 20%. In Vietname the government has allegedly
just made a ruling to use ODF instead of MS formats in their public sector.
In England i still get even Gnu&Linux fans saying that MS Office "is better"
and then complain at length about all the problems they have with MS.
Hopefully things are going to improve on all fronts now that Sun aren't
trying to hide us, just my opinion.

Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

Hi Mark, Tom, *,

Is there a FAQ in any other languages? All the entries on the top
menu suggest not...

IMHO this should be a own thread with a speaking header.
I followed Tom's changes [1] on the main wiki page for the FAQs and asked myself how we should structurize the wiki pages to get the pages translated e.g. in German or other languages.
The main structure for a translated page is seen here [2].
So how to get it in the FAQ-structure?
The English page is e.g:
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Faq/General/137
Following [2] in German it should be:
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Faq/General/137/de

But is this the practicable way for this?
Maybe there should be a guideline for the FAQ pages and its translations. But - as mentioned yet - this should be a new thread.

[1] http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/index.php?title=Main_Page&curid=1&diff=45460&oldid=44681
[2] https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Multilingual_Wiki

Perhaps it'll be easier to translate from English than from French?

:wink:
This is a question of learning the right foreign language.

Grüße
k-j